Culture and Identity Politics in the New Europe

What is Culture? 

Why does it matter for politics?

Culture – some definitions

Anthropology 101 definitions

     Courtesy of Professor Choudhury at Texas A&M??? can’t trace but good info so I’m going to use

• Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. 
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• Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people. 
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• Culture is communication, communication is culture.
• Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.
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• A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next. 
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• Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions. 
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• Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action. 
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• Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.
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• Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.

Based on these definitions, what feelings of attachment to, or pride in one's culture can we expect? 

What does culture have to do with politics??

Thus, political culture is comprised of the values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that define a political community.

What political values are most salient to American political culture?

To European political culture?

Which Europe are we talking about when we talk about European political culture and European political values?  

Western Europe?  Central Europe? Southern    Europe?  Scandinavia? Post-communist Europe?

Does it even make sense to speak of European political culture in these terms?

From Political Culture to National Identity

First, let us define Nation

What does it mean for an identity to become politicized?

  Nationalism

    Good, bad or indifferent?

Britannica on Nationalism

Levels of Political Identity:  think about your own identification with each of these;  which are most salient and why?

    Local - urban or rural

       Sub-national regional

        National

       Trans-national regional

     World Cup Hockey Explained

EU Tops the Rio Medal Count Table 

And that really pisses of British nationalists 

 Global

A Europe of Regions

   The EU's Committee on Regions (COR)

    UNITEE

    Al-Jazeera story on